90-year-old celebrates birthday in WWII style
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By Bill Wundram | Wednesday, June 25, 2008 |
Sometime this weekend, spunky 90-year-old Dorothy Farland, Bettendorf, will imagine that she once again is a 24-year-old U.S. Army WAC.
She expects to sit on a duffel bag while thundering down the runway aboard a four-engine C-25 World War II troop transport plane at the Davenport Municipal Airport for the Quad-City Air Show.
It will be a rendezvous of memories, a 90th birthday gift, because 64 years ago she flew in a troop transport plane like this during one of the last bitter years of the war.
Her son and daughter-in-law, Jef and Dale Farland, Davenport, had bid on the ride at a Big Brothers Big Sisters auction. They thought of Dorothy, who always wanted a good look at the Quad-Cities from the air.
Dorothy says, “I just can’t wait to get on a plane like that again.”
Dorothy — a bee-busy volunteer for good causes — was a WAC (Women’s Army Corps) corporal, assigned to New Guinea in the Pacific war zone. She found herself with eight women, all WACs, and what she remembers as “a bunch of men” in a transport plane A big-job plane like that held 150 service people.
“It was hard seating. I sat on my duffel bag,” she says. “We landed at Lae, where WACs were getting ready for duty on Gen. MacArthur’s staff, stenographers and telegraphers.”
WACs weren’t put into combat situations, but once, in New Guinea, Dorothy was very scared.
“Someone yelled, ‘Hit the deck.’ We were strafed by Japanese planes. We weren’t hit, but when I got up I found that I had wet my pants. I think a lot of the guys, did, too. That strafing qualified me for a battle star, the only one I got for three years in the army.”
Dorothy was a cook for detachments of the Women’s Army Corps. “I served plenty of powdered eggs. In New Guinea, most of the meat I cooked was rabbit. All the time it was rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. I don’t know where they got all the rabbits.”
Dorothy left Lae for Finchagon, New Guinea, working the kitchens again with about 200 WACs. Once, she and a number of WACs were moved to an assignment aboard a Chinese junk, the kind of boat you see in the movies. “All our stoves, cooking gear, were on board.” Transferred to Manila aboard an LST, she had to climb off the craft on a Jacob’s ladder and wade ashore. After Manila, she left the service.
“I felt we did our part.” By “we” she means her two sisters, Virginia and Lois, who also served as WACs. They are deceased.
The transport plane ride will be the high point of her birthday, but she’s not overlooking the 50 residents of Cumberland Apartments where she lives. At noon today, she will have box lunches for everyone and a Good Humor ice cream truck will hand out treats. In lieu of a birthday cake, there’ll be a popcorn wagon.
“I really don’t need a cake,” she says, laughing. “I’ve had enough of them.”
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.
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